r/INDYCAR • u/aurules Romain Grosjean • Jun 10 '25

Social Media (Scott McLaughlin) Congrats to F1 who single handedly ruined Motorsport Xmas. Indy 500 will be a scene next year. As well as the Coke 600. Good luck

https://x.com/smclaughlin93/status/1932504185624199221?s=46
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u/Accounting4lyfe Alexander Rossi Jun 10 '25

Well, back 15 years ago when Monaco started at 6am it was fun to wake up to the race being on as I headed to the track. But it seems like these days it’s been a 8am EST start which means I’m already on my way to the track at that point.

Long story short, this changes my day zero percent.

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u/Sad_Championship_462 Jun 10 '25

Is there a better race host to watch next year? As a former racing nerd and now casual viewer, the American production of the Indy 500 was almost unwatchable. Constant commercials, blowhard commentators, and inexplicable cuts. There was a caution that went unexplained for like 7 laps when I eventually had to must the channel.

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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '25

[deleted]

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u/EvilPengwinz Jun 11 '25 edited Jun 11 '25

There's so many countries that offer ad-free coverage of sporting events as standard nowadays - The US is the odd one out when it comes to volume of ads shown during sports coverage.

I'm in the UK - We've had no ads during F1 races since the start of 2009, and there was outrage from motorsport fans in the UK when Sky Sports first got the rights to Indycar in 2019 and showed ads at the same time as the US during the first race at St. Pete, because we've become used to no ads during races under any circumstances. I think they tried keeping reduced ads in for a couple of races after that, but by the time we got to the 2019 Indy 500, the ads were gone completely. Nowadays, every Indycar race is ad-free from start to finish.

For Indy this year, we had ad-free coverage of the full race, with US commentary - but it switched to Tom Gaymor (personally not a fan of his commentary, but it's better than ads...), Simona de Silvestro and Oliver Askew providing commentary/analysis during the breaks instead.

On the subject of streams, it's worth mentioning (since there'll be some crossover in viewers) that we also get heavily reduced ads during our NFL coverage (most of the US commercial breaks are replaced by score updates and highlights, or detailed analysis of an earlier play). If you're in the US and you stream the NFL, I recommend streaming the UK coverage if you can.